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Comment by c7DJTLrn | Hacker News Reader

What is Reddit's value? There's no secret sauce, its popularity just comes from the network effect. The UI/UX post-redesign is horrible and slow, and the site is bombarded with politics and hatred.

I've had a few Reddit accounts over the years and always deleted them after a few posts. Nobody is capable of having a decent debate without ad hominems, strawman arguments, and downvote bombing. Any opinion against the grain will be silenced and probably just banned. For this reason I actually think Reddit is one of the worse social media sites. I only use it to consume content now and try to stay away from the main subreddits.

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Reddit is the only all encompassing hobbyist forum still remaining on the internet.

I follow my favorite youtubers on their subreddit. I have spent countless hours discussing manga, cars, soccer, politics (in a civil way), find prog bands, food science and so much more.

I can say this confidently: "None of those activities would be as much fun if I did not have my fellow redditors to enjoy it with."

The main subreddits are trash, but that's the point. Reddit might just be able to rapidly scale up to letting normies in, without letting the first-adopters feel like reddit has lost its charm. Specifically, there will be 2 reddits. One would be the front page with a tiktok-esque stream of memes, outrage and short videos; and the other would be the niche subreddits that function similarly to hacker news in terms of strict moderation and deliberate inaccessibility.

Now I am not sure if this genius of reddit is intentional or if the founders stumbled into what is probably the only survival plan for a business where scaling up inevitably leads to a huge drop in the value proposition of the platform itself.

Conde Nast made an incredible acquisition; and not having the market pressures of a public company might have something to do with Reddit's success.

_________

edit: because I must shill for them some more

Reddit is also THE PLACE on the internet for the best surreal humour and organic decentralized art as social experiences. Subreddits like r/196, r/2meirl42meirl4meirl and r/kenm are completely inaccessible without knowing the meta-story around them, but have me rolling on the floor like nothing else. r/place is the most well known reddit decentralized art experience, but r/hqg, and r/youdontsurf create humor and art from a constrained format that can be so meta that the entire front page could be purely self-referential.

The bigger question is: why must hobbyist forums be all-encompassing? Setting up a phpbb is trivial, so what is the advantage to me the user having a single identity linking my professional conversations about software with my more casual conversations about unicycle rally racing?

Convenience and consistency.

I was a big user of forums before reddit, and I am glad it has centralized.

IMO, it is pretty obvious. It is the same reason any social media website has 1 identity for everything on it.

> linking professional conversations and casual conversations

You know you can alt accounts right ?

“Having a single identity for all of your interests is more convenient” and “you can have multiple identities to keep your interests separate” seem like pretty contradictory statements.

Yes they are, and yes some users want both at the same time. Users are complicated.

I can think of many reasons, but I'll limit them to:

1. visibility - it is easier for users to find the community on reddit. Both from search engines, and "organically" on reddit.

2. foot traffic - users don't need to remember that you exist to visit, once a sub is in a user's feed, they will see all of the new posts.

3. Setting up a server and installing forum software might be "easy," but it is still much more difficult than setting up a subreddit.

The only real benefit to setting up a phpbb server is that you might get some revenue from ad traffic once the userbase grows up some.

I think the difficulty in setting up a server and installing forum software is eclipsed by the time, effort, and liability stress from moderating the content and dealing with illegal or undesireable content / malware.

To me, one of the impressive things about Reddit is how they have managed to be a mainstream site with porn, and how they manage to keep it off their front page.

Probably true, but people don't learn that until after they've set up a subreddit and it's gotten somewhat successful.

For their own site, they're immediately hit with a wall of pain as they try to figure out what all they need to know just to get their first user. And there's nothing driving those users to their new forum, either.

I think the easiest way to implement the “2 Reddits” idea would to just have old.reddit.com’s contents be exclusive to old Reddit. I doubt many long time users like the facebook-ish UI which is designed to serve you full screen ads

As a fellow redditor, I just wanted to say that your final paragraph perfectly puts to words my enjoyment of those wildly strange and wonderfully creative self-referential subreddits. So, thanks, for your words.

I edited it in later. I felt an urge to say it, because it is an aspect of reddit that often goes unappreciated.

How much value can you get our of Reddit heavily depends on which subreddits you subscribe to. r/news or r/politics is a cesspool.

r/askhistorians is pure gold. Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable - discussions are polite, to the point, high-quality posts get consistently upvoted. r/coronavirus and r/COVID19 have been pivotal in making sense of the situation in early March (though r/coronavirus turned into a parody of the former self once Covid started spreading in the US). r/nottheonion or r/gaming are often hilarious.

There are three important steps to turn Reddit into a useful tool:

- Unsubscribe from the subreddits you find toxic

- Learn to use 'Sort by Top - this week/day'

- On PC, visit old.reddit.com instead of reddit.com. On mobile, use a third-party client like RedReader or Appolo

For really small subreddits that don't have much activity, you can access the most recent comments directly by tagging on /comments to the subreddit url, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/

That's a new one to me, thanks.

For anyone who didn't know about the extensive rss features of reddit: https://old.reddit.com/wiki/rss

> Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable

I recently subscribed to r/AskElectronics and I have been amazed at the supportiveness of the community. Every time I've posted a picture of some stupid noob mistake I made, I get a deluge of responses helping me understand in detail what I did wrong, along with some good-natured stories of people remembering when they made the same mistake. It's lovely, I'd bake every one of them a pie if I could.

> On PC, visit old.reddit.com

There's a setting that makes it so you default to the old UI, whether you're on old.reddit.com or just reddit.com.

> r/coronavirus and r/COVID19 have been pivotal in making sense of the situation in early March (though r/coronavirus turned into a parody of the former self once Covid started spreading in the US).

I watched this happen first hand. It went from being a solid scientific discussion and sharing of information to being another part of Reddit's control system for public opinion. It just underwent that transformation faster than most subs do because of the impetus of the pandemic.

I know a great deal about a few topics. Based on the quality of discussion of those topics on Reddit I have zero reason to believe that any content of a deeper than "asking questions so shallow you could Google them and the blog spam sites would have the unambiguously correct answer" is of high enough quality to be trustworthy.

Yeah, I do the synthesizer sub on reddit and it's pretty chill. Running / synthesizers / pianolearning have been nothing, but positive. People are on their best behavior because they don't want to ruin it or be the bad apple.

It is a good platform for hobby communities, because it is:

1. Pseudonymous

2. Location-agnostic

3. Comments are structured as a tree instead of a flattened list, and nodes at the same level are sorted by popularity

Old-school message boards met the first two requirements, but I think the third characteristic is a huge improvement over trying to pick the discussion out of the multiple simultaneous flamewars with which it was interleaved on comp.lang.lisp or any of the old phpBB. On a hobby subreddit generally the top reply and its highest-ranked comment chain are on-topic and informative.

Its biggest competition now is probably something like Facebook Groups, but Facebook is constantly trying to push you towards real-name-focused, location-aware stuff, and its implementation of a comment tree is pretty half-assed because at the end of the day it wants you scrolling a feed, not lingering on a heavily-ramified comment tree. At the moment my wife and I use Facebook for neighborhood groups and Reddit for hobby subreddits (and memes).

3 is absolutely terrible for discussion of topics with even the slightest amount of complexity and nuance to them or topics where the discussion would occur over more than a short time. You get unique top level comments but the up-voted stuff is just lowest common denominator and the tree below that initial first level winds up highly replicated. Then there's the inherent fake consensus problem of the upvote/downvote system.

I don't really think flat forum threads scale any better than a tree for replication. You'd see the same point on page 3, 5, 9, 10, 17, where people would just read the first and last pages. There would be multiple parallel quote-reply arguments with people saying the same thing.

I also just don't think your average hobby forum topic is something requiring much nuance or complexity. It's not a philosophy journal, it's someone asking a bunch of internet strangers if they've ever tried using an Arduino for hydroponics and how it went.

I have posted elsewhere about the value of Reddit. Even if you ignore the massive network effects, the main value is:

1. Sign up once, log in everywhere

2. Follow and interact with all of your communities (and groups of related communities) all on the same platform.

3. Better UX for browsing/scanning and text-oriented conversations (no avatars/signatures, collapsible threads) than traditional bulletin boards.

4. Greater sense of interactivity and participation through upvoting, with a natural flow towards posting. First you read logged out, then you make an account just to upvote and downvote a few things, and finally you make a comment or two. Again, lacking an analogue in other platforms.

No other platform has even come close to this except HN, and HN is still one community, not a network of easily-cross-linkable thousands.

To disrupt Reddit 7 years ago you just needed to recognize this and do the same thing but better. To disrupt Reddit now, IDK good luck, inertia is real.

Reddit is a good example of "tyranny by majority" in my opinion. You can see it in action with downvoting opinions people simply don't agree with. It doesn't matter if you have a dozen sources if the 51% simply downvote it for disagreeing.

And Reddit's UI design is truly terrible. I know it's for fitting in more ads, but going from seeing 20 posts per page, and an ad mixed in, to see 2 (sometimes even 1) post that may be an ad is insane.

IME reddit isn't that bad, but it is bad. I can get a good comment upvoted, but not 100% of the time. It's like 50-75% of my comments depending on the tone or disagreement.

Some really batty and bigoted stuff gets upvoted all the time, but IMO the platform is overall very left leaning. It can be pretty inconsistent.

Communities like HN are better, but elsewhere on social media it can get really bad. Digg was horrendous. I don't think I saw a single unpopular opinion not get buried into oblivion. Then I switched to reddit and it's that solid 50-75% I mentioned. You might have to pander or sugar coat it, but you can get the idea out there. It was a big improvement. I think reddit is a cesspool for other reasons.

Reddit is so popular that the “quality” of users has become very poor just by sheer virtue of the number of people using it. Also the 25-75%ile ages are probably like 17-24 so there is a good chance you’re having a conversation with actual teenagers

A low quality comment: you don't even know if it a person. In 2021 you actually need a coherent multi-paragraph post, and a lot of them, to separate a human from a bot. Presumably, there are also a tremendous amount of fake accounts regurgitating low quality information in order to help bump specific posts. That is a perverse incentive of the way their system is structured. The same can/does happen on hn but that activity has some counterbalances.

Reddit strikes me as being well in to its post-spam usenet phase. Instead of being drowned in blatant spam, it is drowned in noise.

A recurring complaint I've heard from friends - experts on narrow topics - is that particular subreddits around a given topic are just dominated with incorrect information. This isn't political. It isn't opinionated. It is topics that may have ranges of correctness, but posters are just repeating things that are completely wrong - as if they have no personal experience in the subject.

That is a big problem. If you were to look at various more political and activist subreddits (including banned ones that migrated elsewhere), the conclusion may be that many reddit user's lives are far worse off with it. When the blind are leading the blind off the side of a cliff, the outcome is predictable.

>What is Reddit's value

Reputation.

If Toyota and Kitchenaid started selling dead bloated racoons with their respective badges on them people would still be buying them 20yr from now because a bunch of people on Reddit (who already bought in based on prior Redditors' commentary) and don't want to feel like fools) told them to buy that brand.

It's no different than any other company selling out its brand name.

I fully agree that the userbase is just politness colored lipstick on the old 4chan pig (every "platform" where riff raff from one niche can easily show up and crap all over another niche has this problem) but that doesn't really impact their ability to make money as a business.

I must agree with the points on the UI/UX. I just opened the app and 95% of what I see on the screen I do not care about. The fact that only 1 list item is immediately available to me as a user is just bizzare.

https://i.imgur.com/YwHTQWa.png: I have highlighted what actually matters to me as user.

There's just so much noise in this new UI. All I want to see is the title, the source, the subreddit the post belongs to, how many comments it has, and MAYBE the upvote count. Put all the navigation stuff in a hidden drawer - it doesn't need to be on the screen all the time and let me switch off these silly awards (or at least tone them down). The rest of the screen is taken up by elements that simply don't need to be on the screen all the time. The search bar can be put in a menu to free up space for more posts. The thumbnails don't need to be there all the time. I don't need an immediately available button to buy Reddit coins / awards. The new awards system (while lucrative) is a complete eyesore and often takes up as much space (if not more) than the title of the post itself.

I cannot express how grateful I am that HN as opted to remain with this simple UI. It's all we need.

the old reddit UI is a lot better and you can still use it. The new reddit UI has been around for a while now, and I think it's actually getting slower. I really tried to like it, but I opted out a month or two ago.

Huh? Well, Reddit is a platform, not a community. A sane usage pattern is to come for a sub, create an account and immediately unsubscribe from all the other subs. I find the communities I participate in not as bad as you describe. But a community defined as "everyone who cares about politics" is simply doomed.

Now, to answer your original question: the value Reddit provides is having a single account for all my communities, instead of registering to umpteen PhpBB. This allows for a much more efficient antispam. Also more efficient ads, so they do have a business out of this.

My experience hasn't been so rough, but I agree overall. Discussions are REALLY hit or miss. I've commented a fair amount there, and some of the conversations are pretty great. It's like a 33%-33%-33%. You get a good conversation, a terrible one, or nobody notices.

I agree about reddit's value being elusive. AFAIK this is because it arguably isn't so valuable. They don't seem to monetize excessively. It's not like Facebook that really feels like an advertising and data shilling firm. There's just a jpeg on the side panel. I imagine they sell some data, maybe even pay to win? (or they will soon)

Reddit is very valuable in that it essentially controls society and "influences" people's behavior. It remains to be seen how much of that can be turned into money, and how it'll effect the site. I wouldn't be shocked to see another exodus, sale, and rebranding as a new media company, like Digg in the next 5-10 years... I wouldn't predict it, but I wouldn't be surprised either.

For me, the problem isn’t the politics. On many special-interest subreddits for various hobbies you avoid the politics almost entirely. The problem is that gradually over the years, the vast majority of people posting on Reddit have been using mobile phones.

Because mobile keyboards are so annoying to type on length on, that has resulted in posts getting shorter and shorter, down to one-line Twitter-like replies that are almost information-free and don’t provide much of the skillsharing that people used to turn to hobby forums for. If you post a couple of solid paragraphs, the same length of text that was normal on Reddit just a few years ago, you look weird and out of place among the one-line posts. You might even get some mockery: "haha wall of text bro".

I would love to leave Reddit entirely and return to the phpBB forums of yore where substantial conversation could continue. The problem is that Reddit has eaten their userbase, leaving only a handful of elderly people or cranks, and the feeling of a ghost town.

Yeah, I agree it shouldn't take you minutes to read a comment, but 0.5-2m is acceptable. You can read 3 paragraphs, get that weak shit out of here.

Then people act like they're totally pwning you by not participating in conversation (which is fine, but then just STFU). This is something I do for fun. It's a hobby, I don't care about the time. No need to be a jerk about it. They probably kick over people's sandcastles, too.

Basically everything that has a chance to show up on /r/all is trash.

Checking out what people in /r/country suggests for turists before you visit is pretty valuable. So is advice in /r/slowcooking, /r/yourhobby and so forth. Basically it allows people to create communities even if they have on technical skills.

The membership of /r/country subs skews heavily towards teenagers and people in their early twenties. They aren't a very good source of tourist advice, because they haven’t had the opportunity in their lives yet to travel much themselves. Also, they tend to be a demographic that identifies itself as cosmopolitan and English-speaking, to the point where they are often ashamed of rural and folkloric traditions that tourists would be interested in.

>Nobody is capable of having a decent debate without ad hominems, strawman arguments, and downvote bombing.

Definitely the same experience here. Holding a conversation on reddit is usually not a pleasant experience. There's tons of great information on reddit, but it's a diamond in the rough sort of situation.

The same can be said from any media that gives its user a voice, from the current website to Twitter.

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